Do nofollow tags allow you to link without penalties?

[DXL]

Most of the sites that I design have a credit link pointing back to my company homepage or deep linking to a specific page on the site. The problem is that I want to display certain sites on my portfolio, but I realize that the moment I link back to them, search engines recognize that the link exchange is reciprocal and the inbound link I had is now devalued (from what I understand).

My question is, if I add a nofollow tag to links of the sites that I developed, will search engines not devalue the inbound link that I had because it no longer sees an exchange taking place? And does that also mean that a site could even trade links with a banned site but use a nofollow tag pointing to them, and that they wouldn't incur a penalty from Google?

I primarily want to know that adding a nofollow tag to my outbound links will keep the value of those inbounds that I have higher than if G perceives a link exchange.

[ogletree]

There is nothing wrong with what you are doing right now. Google has no problem with link exchanges that are natural. The big problem is with automated link exchanges. There are many web designers and SEO's that rank very well because they put links on the bottom of every page they can get their hands on.